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Some of the comments made by Clare Short in her resignation speech yesterday will find an accord with many in the labour and trade union movements who have warned of the growing disclocation between the New Labour government and the party’s traditional rank and file supporters.

New Labour has been accused of being the party of focus group and opinion poll. Although this certainly wasn’t the case so far as Tony Blair’s stance on the war in Iraq, but it is seemingly true that this government pays more attention to opinion polling than any previous government.

Amicus itself has polled its’ membership on a series of issues and the results make unsettling reading for Labour strategists. 90% of our membership are worried about their jobs and pensions, yet the all party group on pensions claims there is not a pensions crisis – a disconnection that is symptomatic of the increasing distance between politicians and those of us who are expected to vote for them.

Amicus members in manufacturing are living with the very real threat of redundancy with 10,000 jobs being lost every month. The problem apart from the downturn in world demand is a productivity gap with our main competitors caused by a failure of employers to invest in skills and new technology added to the relative weakness of our employment protection laws compared other countries in the EU. The only response from the government so far has been the announcement in the budget that Britain will be keeping its’ opt out from the working time directive. So UK workers may be cheaper to sack, have inferior vocational skills and be working with yesterday’s kit but at least they have the opportunity to work themselves into the ground while there are waiting to be sacked. This is no way to show working people the government is in touch with their needs.

This separation from the experiences and feelings of the electorate is brought into even sharper focus when our polls shows that the same 90% are not interested in party politics, it does not connect with their daily lives and concerns.

This is not to say that our members are going to go out and vote Tory, nobody in their right mind would vote for Iain Duncan Smith, but I fear they may join the increasing number of our citizens who choose not to vote at all, as demonstrated in the poor turnout in this months local, Scottish and Welsh elections.

The growth in trade union membership demonstrates that unions are obviously relevant to people’s lives. They are becoming more relevant as the world of work becomes more oppressive. Unions deal with the troubles of working people on a daily basis and are clearly in touch with them.

Yet when we raise issues on behalf of our members in public, we are accused of being from the Planet Zog, we are accused of treachery to the party and of rocking the boat. Well the time has come for a Labour Government, in its sixth year of power to recognise that things should and need to change. We are in the middle of an historic second term and confident in our ability to govern, but we are losing a connection with the electorate and with ordinary party members.

Eight years ago Labour members voted overwhelmingly for the Partnership into Power proposals. It was passed at the height of optimism about a new Labour Government to come and at the height of anguish – ‘we must not rock the boat, if we don’t do it this time then we will never win again.’

Partnership into Power was a necessary process. The idea that Labour Party conference could debate and pass an entire programme of policy designed to renew public services, manage the economy and shape Britain’s position on the world stage in a series of five minute speeches, followed by a card vote is, and was, a nonsense. But we have now gone too far the other way.

The National Policy Forum is not open to ordinary members. Few understand how regional policy forums are organised or elected. There is no clear way that ordinary members of the party can see how the policy they discuss at local meetings works its way through to national conference and into a manifesto to be acted on by a Labour Government. Apparatchiks writing policy documents that are unamendable at conference and do not even take on the feelings of the National Policy Forum in any real way serves to further alienate the membership. To add insult to injury when we do debate policy at Party conference and disagree with the leadership (as we did last year on PFIs) the membership is ignored.

We need to recognise that this is a real problem. It alienates activists who join the Labour Party but find themselves treated as leafleting fodder. They are not valued, their ideas are not wanted and their passion for debate and policy is stymied. They grow to feel that all the party needs from them is the green stuff from their bank accounts and the leather from the soles of their shoes.

I think now is the time for reform and change. I am calling on the Leadership of the Labour Party to create a Constitutional Commission, lead by David Triesman, and to include representation from the length and breadth of the movement.

We don’t want a return to the days when a week of Labour conferences on TV saw us lower in the opinion polls at the end than when we started, but we do desperately need a policy making system that once again makes the ideas and passion of the individual member the building block of party policy. Tony Blair should use his speech at this Labour Party conference to announce the creation of the commission to report back by 2004 conference with recommendations for reform.

This Labour Government is not the evil empire that some on the extreme left has railed against, it has done some great things for ordinary working people but it has become isolated from its owns supporters the longer it’s been in power. I want Labour to win the next election and the one after that and all elections for long to come, but in order to do that it needs to reform and give power back to its people. This is the start of that reform process.